Entries Tagged 'Hand Analysis' ↓

I’ve been helping my brother learn No-limit hold’em the past couple weeks, and he recently made the discovery that a little bit of planning goes a long way. We’ve talked about pot-control, inducing bluffs, and other somewhat complicated concepts. He summarized it in a much simpler, more effective way.

He told me that when the flop comes down, he looks at the board, and at his cards, and asks himself “How big a pot do I want with this hand?” Once he has the answer, the actual play of the hand is easier.

A couple example hands:

Hand 1, a small pot hand:

.50/1.00 NL, $100 effective stacks.

Hero raises As2s to $3 on the button. The BB, a somewhat loose but not terrible player, calls.

The flop is: Ad 4h 4s (pot: $6.50)

How big a pot do we want with this hand? Not a very big one. If we get the remaining $97 into this $6 pot we will undoubtably lose.

There are no draws, so our opponent will rarely have a worse calling hand, and any Ace or better is ahead of us. With that in mind, we would want to get one, perhaps two streets of small betting in at the most to get value from pocket pairs.

If we decide to bet the flop and get raised, a possibly tough decision (is he bluffing? does he really have a 4?) becomes simpler: The pot is getting bigger than is acceptable for our hand’s strength, so we fold.

If bet-folding is uncomfortable, perhaps we check the flop, and our opponent makes a midsized turn bet. We call, intending to call a midsized river bet – hopefully we have induced a bluff.

Things have gotten much simpler now that we know how big we want the pot to be. If our opponent tries to force the pot larger than we are happy with, we simply fold and save some $.

Hand 2, getting value:

.50/1.00 NL, hero has $100 and villain has $25

Folded to hero on the cutoff whe raises to $3 with JhJd. The villain on the button, an unknown shortstack, calls.

Flop: Td 8d 7c (pot: $7.50)

Our opponent has $22 left in a $7.50 pot. With so little left to bet and so many draws out we are happy to get $22 in the pot.

So, we bet full pot ($7.50) so our opponent gets as close to allin as possible before the board can scare him or us. Villain minraises to $15, we stick to the plan and shove, and he calls. (pot: $51.50)

Villain shows Jc8c for middle pair and a gutshot. The turn is a K and the river an A – our Jacks hold up, but the turn and river would have made it very difficult to get villain’s whole stack had we played it slower. Or worse, if we tried to induce bluffs we might have ended up getting pushed off the best hand!

Planning is a powerful tool in NL. Take a look at the flop, and the board before you take an action. Ask yourself “how big of a pot do I want?” With a little practice even tough decisions can become much easier.

This hand came up a few minutes ago while I was playing Pot-Limit Omaha. And I am still learning the game so my advice would be to not necessarily play like I do (yet). I am pretty sure my hand was correctly played, I will give my thought process and equity calculations later on.

Let’s get to the hand, my pre-flop call could have been a little on the loose side. Although my hand does play pretty well against AAxx which I think the small blind has here, and the big blind seemed to be a pretty weak player so he could have had a wide range of different suited cards or even a hand like KKxx or QQxx and if he has a hand like that then my equity is slightly +EV hot and cold pre-flop, that means I could get it in pre-flop here and win in the long-run but it would be a marginal play at best.

My reads on the players:

Small Blind: Too loose and too aggressive, will stack off lightly. I have tangled with him and gotten the best of it so there is an outside chance he is sick of me.

Big Blind: Bad loose player who calls too much, haven’t played much with him so no further reads.

Now, It’s 4-handed $0.50/$1.00 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi. I am dealt
Q J 9 8 and I pot it to $3.5 Under the Gun (also cut-off in a 4-handed game), the button calls, the small blind pots it to $15, the big blind calls (who has less than a buy-in) and I decide to call. I have a good multi-way hand and I have position so that helps me a bit but not much since the pot has been bloated.

The flop brings K T 2

Giving me a wrap and a flush draw. The term wrap is used when you have several straight draws, which I have here. I have the J9, QJ, Q9, that means I win by hitting a 9, J, Q or A (assuming the best) and I also have my flush draw, but it could be crushed by a higher flush draw. I am almost 100% that the small blind has some kind of AAxx hand which are usually played hard pre-flop in Pot-Limit Omaha and rightly so because they often have a nice equity edge.

Consider my hand Q J 9 8 vs. say A A K 9 on that same K T 2 flop

My equity is actually 62% to win here, so I am a favorite. With that said, let’s get back to the actual hand.

The small blind now pots it $60, the big blind calls all-in for his last $58.95 and I decide to push all-in for $124.85. The small blind calls $64.85 and we’ve got a three-way all-in pot.

The flop K T 2 (so you don’t have to scroll up or anything)

The small blind shows A A K T
The big blind shows K T 8 6
I have Q J 9 8

And I am actually not happy at all to see that the big blind has a higher flush draw than me, but I knew it was definitely a possibility. I still have my wrap though!

Turn comes Q giving me a straight

River is 8 and I scoop the whole pot which was $368.65, an almost 4 buy-in pot which I am satisfied having shipped to my residence.

Now, during the hand I thought I was totally screwed because my flush draw was no longer. I calculated my equity afterwards and these are the numbers I got from the twodimes calculator.

The small blind A A K T 12.91% to win, 25.83% to tie
The big blind K T 8 6 28.23% to win, 25.83% to tie
Me Q J 9 8 33.03% to win

And do you know how much equity I need in a 3-way pot to break-even? 33.333%, so it turned out to be a break-even play even though I ran into a bad spot where one of my opponents had a higher flush draw.

Remember, I was a favorite in the side pot versus the aces so it turned out O.K even though I thought I was in bad shape. Just goes to show you how important it is to go through and analyze your hands after you’ve played them and spot any mistakes.